Injured at work in Türkiye as a foreign employee: what the SGK pays, what your employer owes on top, and how the claim is brought.

1. What Counts as a Work Accident (Law 5510 Art. 13)

Turkish law does not leave the definition to the employer or to the insurer. Article 13 of the Social Insurance and General Health Insurance Law No. 5510 defines a work accident (iş kazası) as an event that occurs in one of five situations and that immediately or subsequently renders the insured person physically or mentally disabled: while the insured is at the workplace; because of the work carried out by the employer (or, for the self-employed, because of the work they carry out); while an employee sent on duty to another place is not performing their main work; during the periods set aside for a nursing mother to feed her child; and while travelling to or from the place of work in a vehicle provided by the employer.

The breadth of the first limb matters for foreign workers. An injury at the workplace is a work accident whether or not the worker was doing their assigned task at that moment; a fall in the canteen, an assault in the yard or a heart attack brought on at the site can all qualify, subject to the causal and medical questions the Institution and the courts examine. The employer-vehicle limb covers the shuttle bus but not a worker's own car; the "because of the work" limb catches the accident off-site during a delivery or an installation.

A foreign national working under an employment contract in Türkiye is an insured person within the meaning of the Law unless a bilateral social security agreement exempts them, typically because they are posted from their home country for a limited period and remain covered there. Whether the worker was actually registered by the employer is a different question. Unregistered employment is the employer's breach; it does not prevent the event from being a work accident, although it makes proving the employment relationship, the wage and the circumstances harder, and Article 13 allows the Institution to have the event investigated by its own inspectors or by Ministry labour inspectors before deciding whether it qualifies.

2. The Three-Working-Day Report and Why It Matters

Two statutes impose the same deadline. Under Article 13 of Law 5510, the employer must report a work accident involving an employee to the competent law enforcement authorities immediately and to the Institution within three working days at the latest, using the work accident and occupational disease declaration, delivered directly or by registered post. Where the accident happened somewhere outside the employer's control, the period runs from the date the employer learned of it. Article 14 of the Occupational Health and Safety Law No. 6331 repeats the obligation — all work accidents must be recorded and investigated by the employer and reported to the Institution within three working days — and adds that health service providers must report the work accidents that reach them within ten days at the latest.

The report is not a formality for the injured worker. It is the document that opens the Institution's file, fixes the date and the description of the event, and triggers the benefits described below. An employer that fails to report on time bears a specific consequence: under Article 21 of Law 5510, the temporary incapacity allowance the Institution pays for the period up to the date of the late report is recovered from the employer. An employer that reports the event as something other than a work accident, or describes it in a way that shifts the blame to the worker, sets up the fault dispute that the compensation claim will later turn on.

A foreign worker should therefore do three things in the first days: make sure the accident is reported and obtain a copy or at least the reference of the declaration; ensure that the hospital records describe the event as a work accident and record how it happened; and write down the names of colleagues who saw it. Where the employer refuses to report, the worker or their lawyer can notify the Institution directly and ask for the investigation that Article 13 provides for.

3. What the SGK Pays: Allowance, Income and Treatment

The Institution's benefits do not depend on fault. They are the floor of the worker's recovery.

Treatment. Medical treatment of the injury is provided through the general health insurance system.

Temporary incapacity allowance. Under Article 18 of Law 5510, an insured person who becomes unable to work because of a work accident receives a temporary incapacity allowance for each day of incapacity certified by a physician or health board authorised by the Institution. The allowance is half of the daily earnings computed under Article 17 during inpatient treatment and two-thirds during outpatient treatment. Unlike ordinary sickness, there is no waiting period for a work accident: the allowance runs from the first day.

Permanent incapacity income. Under Article 19, an insured person whose earning capacity in their occupation is found by the Institution's health board, on the basis of reports from authorised health providers, to have been reduced by at least 10 per cent as a result of the accident is entitled to a permanent incapacity income. The income is calculated on the degree of loss: for total permanent incapacity it is 70 per cent of the monthly earnings computed under Article 17; for partial incapacity the full-incapacity figure is scaled to the degree of incapacity; and where the worker needs another person's constant care the rate applied is 100 per cent. The income starts from the beginning of the month following the end of the temporary allowance, or following the health board report where permanent incapacity was found without a temporary phase, and it can be reassessed if the worker is treated again and the degree of loss changes.

The degree of loss of earning capacity fixed by the Institution matters twice: it decides the income, and it becomes the starting point — though not the last word — for the calculation of the compensation the employer owes. A worker who disagrees with the rate has the right to challenge it, and the courts take their own expert evidence in the compensation action.

4. The Employer's Liability: TBK 417 and Law 6331

The employer's duty is stated in two places, and both are written in absolute terms. Article 417 of the Turkish Code of Obligations (Türk Borçlar Kanunu, TBK No. 6098) provides that the employer is obliged to take every measure necessary to ensure occupational health and safety at the workplace and to keep the tools and equipment complete, while workers are obliged to comply with the measures taken. The third paragraph of the same Article is the provision that founds the compensation claim: damages arising from the worker's death, injury to bodily integrity or violation of personality rights caused by the employer's conduct contrary to the law or the contract, including the duties just described, are compensated under the rules on liability for breach of contract.

Article 4 of Law 6331 sets out what "every measure" means. The employer is responsible for ensuring the health and safety of workers in connection with their work and, within that framework, must take all measures including the prevention of occupational risks, training and information, the organisation of the work and the provision of the necessary tools and equipment; must monitor whether the measures taken are being complied with and remedy non-compliance; must carry out or commission a risk assessment; must take account of the worker's fitness for the task in terms of health and safety when assigning work; and must prevent workers who have not received adequate information and instruction from entering areas of serious and specific danger. Two further rules in the same Article are decisive in litigation: obtaining services from external experts or institutions does not remove the employer's responsibility, and the workers' own obligations in the field of occupational health and safety do not affect the employer's responsibility. The employer may not pass the cost of safety measures on to workers.

Liability under these provisions is founded on fault in the sense that the employer must have failed in a duty, but the duty is defined so widely — training, supervision, equipment, risk assessment, fitness for the task — that in the great majority of work accidents some failure can be shown. The worker's own carelessness is not a defence that eliminates liability; it is a factor that may reduce the compensation proportionally, and Article 4(3) of Law 6331 prevents the employer from converting the worker's duty of compliance into a complete answer. Where the accident was genuinely unavoidable despite every measure, the employer may escape or reduce liability, and the principle of inevitability (kaçınılmazlık) appears expressly in the recourse rule discussed in Section 6.

5. Heads of Damage and the 2026 Change to TBK 55

Article 54 of the Code of Obligations lists the bodily damages that can be claimed: treatment expenses; loss of earnings during the period of incapacity; losses arising from the reduction or loss of working capacity, which is the largest head in a serious injury and is calculated over the worker's expected working life; and losses arising from the shaking of the worker's economic future, which captures the harder-to-quantify effect on a career. Article 56 adds non-pecuniary damages: the court may award the injured person an appropriate sum of money for the injury to bodily integrity having regard to the particular circumstances, and in cases of serious bodily injury or death may also award such a sum to the injured person's or the deceased's close relatives.

Article 55 governs how the figure is arrived at. Damages for loss of support and bodily damages are calculated under the provisions of the Code and the principles of liability law. Social security payments that cannot be recovered by recourse, in whole or in part, and payments that do not have the purpose of performance are disregarded in determining these damages and are not deducted from the damage or the compensation. The calculated compensation cannot be increased or reduced on grounds of equity by reference to its amount. The same rules apply, the Article adds, to claims arising from administrative acts and from other causes for which the administration is liable.

In July 2026 the legislature added two paragraphs to Article 55 by Law No. 7589, and both change the arithmetic of a work accident claim. First, on compensation for the reduction or loss of working capacity and for loss of support, statutory interest runs from the date of the harmful event on the part of the compensation calculated for the period in which the injured person's earnings are known, and from the date of judgment on the part calculated for the period in which the earnings are not known. Second, any amount paid with the purpose of performance before the investigation stage begins is set off against the compensation determined as at the payment date, proportionally. For workers, the first rule means that the years a case spends in court no longer erode the value of the past-loss component; for employers and their insurers, the second rule means that an early payment is credited on a proportional basis rather than simply subtracted from a figure calculated years later.

6. Recourse: Why the Employer Fights Over Fault (Law 5510 Art. 21)

Foreign workers are often puzzled by the intensity with which an employer disputes fault in an accident whose facts seem plain. The explanation is Article 21 of Law 5510. Where a work accident or occupational disease occurred as a result of the employer's intent or of the employer's act contrary to the legislation on protecting the health of the insured and on occupational safety, the Institution recovers from the employer the payments it has made or will make to the insured or their dependants under the Law and the first capitalised value of the income it has granted, limited to the amounts the insured or their dependants could claim from the employer. The principle of inevitability is taken into account in determining the employer's responsibility.

The same Article contains the sanction for late reporting mentioned in Section 2, a rule on workers employed in jobs for which a health report was required without such a report or contrary to it, and a rule on third parties: where the accident was caused by a third party's fault, half of the payments and of the first capitalised value of the income is recovered from that third party and, if they were at fault, from the person employing them. It also provides that no recourse is taken against dependants who were themselves at fault in the death of the insured.

The consequence for the compensation claim is twofold. The employer's exposure is not only to the worker but to the Institution, so the percentage of fault attributed to the employer, to the worker and to any third party is contested in every serious case, usually through expert reports on occupational safety. And because the Institution can recover the capitalised value of the permanent incapacity income from an employer at fault, that value is deducted from the compensation the employer owes the worker for loss of working capacity: the worker is not paid twice for the same loss. What the Institution cannot recover is not deducted, as Article 55 of the Code of Obligations confirms.

7. Procedure, Deadlines and a Comparison Table

No mediation. Most Turkish employment claims cannot be filed without first attempting mediation. Work accident claims are the exception: Article 3(3) of the Labour Courts Act No. 7036 provides that the mandatory mediation requirement does not apply to actions for pecuniary and non-pecuniary damages arising from a work accident or occupational disease, or to the related declaratory, objection and recourse actions. The compensation claim is filed directly before the labour court. Where the dispute is with the Institution itself, for example over whether the event is a work accident or over the degree of incapacity, the Act separately requires an application to the Institution before it is sued.

Deadlines. Because Article 417(3) places the employer's liability under the rules on contractual liability, the claim against the employer is subject to the general ten-year limitation period in Article 146 of the Code of Obligations. Claims against third parties responsible for the accident follow the tort rule in Article 72: two years from the date the injured person learned of the damage and of the person liable, and in any event ten years from the act, with the longer criminal limitation period applying where the act is also a crime.

Evidence. The case is decided on the accident report and the Institution's investigation file, the hospital records, the health board's incapacity rate, the workplace risk assessment and training records, the testimony of colleagues, and expert reports on occupational safety and on the actuarial calculation. A foreign worker who has left Türkiye can conduct the case through a lawyer under a power of attorney, and the incapacity rate can be examined on the medical file; presence at hearings is not normally required.

A foreign employee injured at work in Türkiye should treat the Institution's benefits as what they are — a statutory floor paid without regard to fault — and treat the employer's liability as the claim that actually compensates the injury. The two are linked through the recourse rule, which is why the employer contests fault, and through Article 55, which decides what is deducted. With no mediation hurdle and a ten-year period against the employer, the claim is procedurally straightforward; what decides it is the quality of the evidence gathered in the first weeks.

Scope. This page is general information about Turkish law and procedure. It is not legal advice, it is not an assessment of your situation, and reading it does not create a lawyer-client relationship. Statutory figures, thresholds and rates are revised periodically — check the current position before relying on any of them. Any particular case turns on its own documents and facts.